Wednesday, June 24, 2015

To Summer Rainstorms in Texas

I’ve seen it rain without a cloud in the sky. Thunder cracks like a tree splitting. You have 4.3 seconds to decide where to go.

No where outside of Texas have I felt raindrops this thick, like small water balloons, drops so big I can feel each one individually as I run from the car to the store. I can’t really see the store, but I remember it’s there.

Flashflooding. The ground is hard and dry and cannot soak up the all rain. The water fills up the roots around the crepe myrtles lining the parking lot. The flowers shake but don’t fall, delicate deception in those spacey blooms.
 The water will rise to the curb in 3-4 minutes. The rain pools in places we forgot and floods the edges of our yards, reveals all the grooves and dips we try to ignore, try to landscape away. But something, small shifts in the earth perhaps, reveal the depressions again and again. The rain fills them.

And then over. The rain vanishes. The temperature rises again: 87, 93, 96, 101. Steam rises from the concrete.  We hold our breath, hoping everyone emerges from the storm. We wait to hear the mockingbird.

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